


Like a Patient Etherized Upon the Table

by nik_knows_nothing



Series: Let Us Go Then, You and I [1]
Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anxiety, Blood, Brief Descriptions of Injury, Gen, Hydra Is Not Nice, I don't know how medical stuff works, Medical Experimentation, Or military stuff, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21735904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/pseuds/nik_knows_nothing
Summary: The first time Ava meets the Soldier, she is still very young.Or: the man who used to be Bucky doesn't remember much, but he still knows enough to not let the random little girl on the operating table play with a double-edged serrated blade.So really, he's still got the important stuff down.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Ava Starr
Series: Let Us Go Then, You and I [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1566619
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	Like a Patient Etherized Upon the Table

The first time she meets the Soldier, Ava is still very young.

It’s been about a year and a half since the accident that changed— _everything_ , and she’s only been in this new place for a few weeks, and everything is still so strange and different.

Everything hurts, of course, but it’s been a year and a half.

She’s already almost used to it.

After all, Ava tells herself as she follows the men in the white coats down the hall, she is nearly ten years old.

Everyone knows that only babies cry.

And Ava’s not a baby, so when the pain comes, she curls her hands into fists on either side of the jumpsuit they gave her, focuses on breathing in and out, the way that Bill told her to do before he had to leave, and she doesn’t stop walking.

“Hurry up,” one of the men says anyways. “We don’t have all day.”

Ava has all day.

Since Bill had to leave, all she does is sit in rooms or walk down halls and wait for someone in a white coat to tell her what to do.

She doesn’t really get why everyone always wants to go so fast.

But she nods and tries to walk a little bit faster, even though the shoes she’s wearing are too big, so that she has to curl her toes to keep them from slipping off the heel.

Yesterday, she ran on a treadmill for what felt like forever, and those shoes were too big, too, and so the back of her foot still hurts from where the shoe rubbed the skin off.

The men in the white coats stop at a door that doesn’t have a number on it, and then the man who told her to hurry up holds a card up to the door, and it clicks open.

Ava watches the door open, thinks about how she woke up this morning on the floor beneath her bed, and wonders if she could just walk through, once the door is closed.

She doesn’t like to think about that.

The doctors put something in her neck, and they said that it would stop her from walking through walls, but she fell through the bed this morning, and she’s not so sure.

Mum told her once that underneath the ground, there was a lot of rock, and then a lot of fire, and Ava isn’t sure what would happen if she started to sink through the floor.

Would someone come and pull her back up, or would she just keep floating down until she fell out on the other side of the world?

The world, she knows, is a very big place.

It would take her a very long time to fall.

“In here,” the man says, and jerks his head for her to hurry up.

Ava blinks, because the pain in her head is making it hard to focus, and if she doesn’t focus on walking like normal, she’s scared she might fall—

“Hurry up,” the man says again, and she walks through the door.

The room on the other side of the door looks like a doctor’s office, and Ava feels her mouth go all dry and gross at the sight of it.

She’s only been here for a couple of weeks, but she already knows she doesn’t like doctors.

“Wait here,” the man says, and points at one of the tables, the padded kind with the plastic wrap on top, so that it’s always clean. “Dr. Douglas will be in to see you in a few minutes.”

Ava nods and climbs up onto the table.

The plastic wrap is cold, and her hands stick to it when she tries to move, so she folds her hands into her lap and kicks her heels against the legs of the table.

The men in the white coats leave, and she waits.

When Dr. Douglas comes in, he smiles, like he’s glad to see her.

Ava doesn’t like his smile.

His eyes don’t move when he smiles.

But she’s not a baby, and so she doesn’t lean away when he comes and puts the cold stethoscope over her heart, or when he shines the light in her eyes and puts the thing on her arm that squeezes too tightly.

He doesn’t ask her how she’s feeling.

Before, whenever she had to go to the doctor with her mum or her dad, the lady would always smile at her and ask how she was feeling, even when she felt too bad to answer.

Dr. Douglas doesn’t do that.

Ava stares into the light as he holds it in front of her, keeps her hands folded in her lap, and tries to remember what the other doctor’s name was.

She can’t remember.

It wasn’t very long ago, she ought to be able to remember—

“Alright, Ava,” Dr. Douglas says, and turns to take something off one of the other tables. “Looks like those blisters are healing up nicely. We’re just going to give you a shot to make sure there’s nothing wrong.”

Ava watches as he fills the needles.

“I already had my shots,” she says, even though she’s nearly ten years old, and she’s not afraid of needles, she’s _not_ —

“Did you?” Dr. Douglas says, in the absent voice that says he’s not really listening to her.

“Last week,” Ava tells him. “And the week before that.”

At least this needle isn’t as big as the ones they used the first week, the ones that left bumps all up and down her backbone, so that she had to sleep on her stomach until they went away.

She can handle one more shot, so long as it doesn’t hurt too badly.

Maybe it’ll even help her head stop hurting.

“Those were different,” Dr. Douglas says. “This is to boost your immune system. Do you know what an immune system is?”

Ava’s dad is— _was_ —a scientist.

Her mum taught at a university.

 _Of course I know what an immune system is_ , Ava thinks. _I’m not dumb._

But last week, when she told Dr. Douglas that she knew what a scalpel looked like, he just laughed at her and told her she must be confused.

So she shakes her head, and listens with half an ear while Dr. Douglas tells her things that she already knew.

Really, the shot isn’t so bad.

Ava makes herself watch the needle as it pokes under her skin, because she’s too old to keep looking away.

Then she has to sit very still while Dr. Douglas pushes down the sliding part of the needles, and she wonders where all the extra liquid is going inside of her, and wonders, if she moved very quickly, would the needle snap?

She doesn’t move.

When Dr. Douglas pulls the needle out, Ava looks at the hole that it left in her arm, and she wonders what Dr. Douglas would do if she asked for a band-aid with smiley faces on it, like the kind the other doctor used to give her, before.

She still can’t remember the lady’s name.

But Dr. Douglas doesn’t give her a band-aid, and she doesn’t want to ask, so she sits very still as Dr. Douglas goes back to his charts and starts asking her the same questions he asks every time she comes to visit him.

“How would you rate your pain on a scale from one to ten?”

“Three,” Ava says, because when she says anything above five, they give her something that makes her fall asleep, and then she wakes up in a different room and doesn’t know what happened in between.

She doesn’t like the not-knowing.

“How long has it been since you last phased through any sort of impermeable barrier?”

Ava thinks about waking up and staring at the metal bars of her bed from underneath.

“Not since last week,” she says, and makes herself look Dr. Douglas in the eyes when he gives her a funny look.

She’s not sure he believes her.

Her hands want to fidget in her lap, and so she makes them lie still, but it takes her too long, because Dr. Douglas definitely notices, and he frowns.

“Ava,” he says, very serious. “Are you telling me the truth?”

Ava doesn’t let herself look away, even though she really, really wants to.

“Yes,” she lies, and Dr. Douglas frowns again.

“Ava—”

But whatever he was going to say, he never gets to finish.

The door flies open with a crash, and then there are a bunch of men in black shirts and pants, coming in too fast, and one of the men looks like he’s about to fall over, if he weren’t being held up.

Dr. Douglas jumps to his feet, and Ava sits very, very still and wonders what would happen if she sunk through the table right now.

“What’s going on?” Dr. Douglas snaps. “I’ve got a subject here!”

 _The subject,_ Ava thinks, and presses her thumbnail into the palm of her hand until it leaves a line. _My name is Ava_.

“Sorry, doc,” one of the men says, and nods towards the other man, the one who’s only barely still standing up. “Need emergency med treatment.”

Dr. Douglas scowls.

“Then take him to the medical wing,” he says, and he’s not even trying to pretend like he’s smiling. “This is a research facility—”

“He needs a stabilizer.”

Dr. Douglas stops talking.

Ava has her head tipped down, so that they won’t think she’s eavesdropping, but she looks up out of the corner of her eyes, and looks at the man who’s about to fall.

“A stabilizer,” Dr. Douglas says, and the first man shrugs.

“Holes keep closing up. Med team says they can’t get the bullets out in time.”

Ava looks at the tiles on the floor and wonders if they know she’s still there.

Maybe they just can’t see her.

It happened before, after the explosion, and then once again last week, when there was a bang out in the hall, and she disappeared without even meaning to—

She doesn’t like to disappear like that.

It makes the thing in her neck hurt.

“Do you have authorization?” Dr. Douglas asks, and the man in the black shirt huffs out a breath of air that sounds annoyed.

“Come on, doc,” he says, talking fast and harsh. “Just give us the shot, he’ll be out of your hair and back in cryo in no time at all.”

Dr. Douglas still takes a moment to decide.

“The stabilizer takes time,” he says. “You won’t be able to operate for a good ten minutes after the initial dosage is delivered.”

The man in black shrugs again.

“Then we’d better hurry,” he says, and Dr. Douglas sighs. “Who’s your commanding officer?”

“Jenkins.”

“Get him on the line for me.”

“He’s in debrief.”

“Fine,” Dr. Douglas snaps. “But I want to talk to Jenkins right away.”

“The soldier—”

“Get him in the chair,” he says, and Ava watches from beneath her eyelids as they put the man into a chair, where he slumps over and doesn’t move a lot.

Dr. Douglas stomps back over to his tray of needles, takes one over to the row of bottles that are on the shelf, and then fills it up.

He’s talking to himself while he does it, and Ava listens, but he seems like he’s throwing a tantrum, not like he’s actually saying anything he wants people to hear. The needle is full, and so he stomps back over to the man in the chair, pushes up the sleeve on his arm, and jabs the needle in without wiping the skin down first, the way he’s supposed to do.

“There,” he says and scowls at the man in black. “He’s not going anywhere.”

The other men stand around and make a sort of muttering noise to show that they’re agreeing, and then Dr. Douglas stands a little straighter.

Ava thinks he’s probably doing it to look taller, since he’s shorter than all of the other guys, enough that it’s noticeable.

“Where’s Jenkins?” he demands, and the man in black looks amused.

“Down the hall,” he says, and then does something with his voice that makes it sound even more sarcastic than sarcasm. “ _Sir_.”

Dr. Douglas kind of wavers for a second, but then he nods and puffs himself up a little bit more.

“I want to talk with him,” he says. “I’m a scientist, not a doctor—”

He’s still grumbling as he heads to the door, and the man in black says something to the man in the chair before moving to follow.

 _I’m still here_ , Ava thinks, and wonders if they’ll leave the door open.

“You!” Dr. Douglas barks, and Ava jumps and sees that he’s pointing at her. “Don’t move until I get back.”

Ava nods, and the man in black seems to notice her for the first time, gives her a smile that makes her feel very cold, and then follows Dr. Douglas out into the hall.

“Lock the door,” one of the men in the hall says, and then Ava hears the _click_ as the door shuts.

She sits very still and wonders whether they saw her before Dr. Douglas pointed her out.

For a few minutes, she doesn’t move.

She’s gotten very good at being this quiet.

But the man in the chair doesn’t move, either, and Ava wonders if maybe he’s fallen asleep.

She wonders if maybe he’s dead.

She sneaks a look over—

And the man is awake.

He’s not looking at her, but his eyes are moving around—it’s the only part of his face she can see, because he’s got this cool-looking mask on, and it looks like it probably is a little bit uncomfortable.

The man looks right at her, and Ava startles a little.

Then she remembers that she’s not afraid, that she’s ten years old (almost), and that there are cameras everywhere she goes, and that they wouldn’t just leave him here if he was really all that scary.

So she waves, and the man’s eyes follow her hand. “Hello.”

For a long second, she thinks maybe he didn’t hear her.

But his hands, resting neatly on the arms of the chair, move just a little, and Ava thinks that maybe he was about to wave back.

“My name’s Ava,” she says, because she knows how to be polite, even if she doesn’t see much use for it these days.

The man looks at her hands, and then at her shoes, and then at her face once more.

“Hello, Ava,” he says.

His voice comes out kind of muffled, because of the mask, and Ava wonders if his face gets hot underneath, or if he takes it off whenever it gets too itchy and stuffy.

He doesn’t introduce himself.

Ava thinks maybe he doesn’t see the use in being polite, either.

“What’s your name?” she asks anyways.

The man’s eyes slide away again, and he shrugs.

Ava watches him shrug and thinks about what the man in black said about the bullets, and wonders where they are, since she doesn’t see any holes in the front of him.

A shrug isn’t an answer.

They’re the only two people in the room, he might as well talk to her.

“Don’t you know it?” she asks, and sounds a little bit mean, but he can’t just keep not talking to her, she’s the only person there to talk to—

He shrugs again, and Ava sniffs.

“Everybody knows their name,” she says, because it’s true. “If you don’t want to tell me, you can just say you don’t want to tell me.”

He doesn’t say that.

Instead, he looks back at her face, and then over at the door, and from what little she can see, she thinks he might be frowning.

“What are you doing here, Ava?” he asks.

Ava shrugs, and tries to make it look as easy as the man in the chair does.

“They’re giving me shots,” she says, and doesn’t know how to explain it, other than that. “To keep me from falling.”

“Oh,” the man says.

Ava watches him, and his eyes look around the room a few more times, but other than that, he doesn’t move at all.

It’s kind of scary.

In spite of herself, Ava is just a little bit scared.

“Why are you wearing a mask?” she blurts, because it’s easier than being scared.

The man looks back over at her quickly, like she’s surprised him.

Then he lifts one hand and taps a finger against the mask.

It makes a kind of _plink, plink_ noise, and Ava realizes the mask is harder than she thought it was.

She thinks that makes it worse, but she’s not sure why.

“Protects the face,” the man says.

Ava nods.

If he wanted to protect his face, she thinks, he should wear something that covers the top of his head.

It won’t do much, otherwise.

The man puts his hand down again, and Ava thinks that that was probably rude of her, that she shouldn’t have asked why he was wearing it.

“It makes you look like a ninja,” she says, before she can think better of it.

The man’s hands are very still. “Does it?”

Ava nods. “Are you a ninja?”

The man looks at her for a second.

Then he says, “No.”

Ava wishes he would talk a little more.

She could ask him to take off the mask, she thinks, but it might be easier for him to wear it, the way it's easier for her to pretend she's not watching people when her hair is in her face.

“You look like a ninja," she tells him again.

“Okay," he says.

Ava looks at the soldier, and he looks back at her, and she thinks about what the man in black said, about how he's probably going to have to go on one of the plastic wrap tables and let them cut him apart.

There's something tucked in the sleeve of his jacket, poking out over his glove, and Ava frowns at it until she understands.

“Is that a knife?” she asks.

The man follows her gaze, and almost nods, but then doesn't.

“Yes.”

Ava looks a little longer. “Can I hold it?”

The man in the chair blinks, and then looks from her to the knife and then back again.

“It isn’t clean," he says.

But he's got it tucked right up under his sleeve, so it's not like it's enough of a problem for him to be worried about.

“It looks clean," Ava says.

“It isn’t.”

“Can I hold it?”

The man blinks one more time, and Ava realizes that she's only really noticed because she's pretty sure he wasn't blinking before.

Then he sighs.

It sounds funny with the mask, but she hears the weird little puff of air that could be a sigh or could be a cough or could even be a laugh, if it weren't for the fact that he doesn't seem like the kind of person who laughs a lot.

“Sure," he says, and the knife slides out of his sleeve and down into his hand.

He turns it around and then holds it out, so that the pointy end is facing him, and the handle is facing her.

Ava suddenly feels like she's being dared.

And she's never backed down from a dare, not ever.

So she hops down from off the table, bites her tongue when moving too fast makes a jolt of pain echo in her ears, and walks across the room to take the knife.

It's very cold.

It's very cold, and it's clean, even though the man said it wasn't, and Ava leans against the arm of the chair and holds the knife in both hands so that she won't drop it.

“It’s heavy," she says, because it is.

“Yes," the man says.

There's something scratched into the handle, but it's in another language, with different letters, so Ava traces the shapes and wonders what it's supposed to say.

“The people who stand outside my door, they don’t have knives," she tells the man as she traces one of the letters. "They have guns, but I don’t think I’m supposed to see them. They like to pretend they don’t have guns.”

They wear them under their white coats, or in their belts, where they thinks she won't see.

She sees them, anyways.

“Oh," the man says.

“But I can see them," Ava says. "When they’re not looking at me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah."

There's something stuck on the base of the handle, and she scrapes at it with her fingernail.

"When they know I’m looking, they like to pretend that this is just a summer camp or something.”

“Oh.”

“But I know it’s not," Ava tells him. "I’m ten years old, I’ve been to a summer camp. I know this is something different.”

“You’re ten years old," the man says, and watches as she finally manages to scrape the _whatever-it-was_ off the handle.

“Well, not yet,' she admits."But I will be. Soon. I think I’ll probably be ten soon.”

She's not sure how long she's been here.

She thinks probably two weeks, but when they give her a shot to make her go to sleep, she guesses it could be longer, and she wouldn't really know.

She's been holding the knife for long enough, she decides, and turns it around very carefully to give it back.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.”

The man takes the knife, flips it around once, and then starts to put it back in his sleeve.

“Can you do any tricks?” Ava asks, and he doesn't put the knife away.

“Tricks," he echoes.

Ava nods.

“One of the men who worked with my dad," she says. "The one who brought him the machine pieces he needed, he had a knife, and he knew how to twirl it around and make it look really cool.”

The man looks down at her for a second.

Even sitting down, he's a lot taller than she is, and Ava thinks about the way Dr. Douglas puffed himself up to look bigger, and so she definitely doesn't stand up on her tiptoes, just a very little bit.

The soldier looks at her for a second, and then he twirls the knife.

It's kind of like what her dad's friend did, except a lot faster, and Ava tries to watch the blade as it spins through his hand, but it's really, really fast, and the light off the blade is almost enough to send another wave of pain through her head.

The knife stops, and Ava realizes that she's smiling.

“Do that again," she says.

He does.

It's like watching a magician on TV, except Ava can't think of any magicians who use knives like this one, and so she watches the blade flash between his fingers and thinks that it's the coolest thing she's ever seen.

“Can I try?” she asks, and the knife stops mid-twirl.

“No," the man says.

He puts the knife away, and the sleeve of his shirt tucks up a little bit, so that she can see his hand.

Or she could, if his hand were a normal hand.

Instead, all she sees is metal.

Ava looks for a long time, and then she realizes that the man is watching her stare at his hand, and that's rude, even for her, so she looks away and feels her face getting hot.

“Sorry," she says.

“It’s alright.”

He tugs the cuff of his sleeve back down into place, smooths it down, and doesn't yell at her for staring.

That's nice, Ava thinks.

And at any rate, she doesn't think he'll tell on her to the doctors.

She's still leaning against the arm of the chair, and she thinks about the thing that they put in her neck and wonders if he can feel his hand, the way she can still feel the explosion.

“What happened to your hand?” she asks, and the soldier looks at her.

“It got hurt," he says, after another long pause, and Ava thinks _well, duh, I know that much_ , but doesn't say it out loud.

“Can I see?”

The man does the thing he did before, where he doesn't answer, but he goes very still and very quiet, and she thinks that's probably an answer all by itself.

“Please?” she tries.

The man thinks about it for a little while longer.

Then he tugs off the glove and lays his hand, palm up, back down on the arm of the chair again.

Ava can't help herself.

She leans in to get a closer look, and the soldier lets her poke at the metal plating, even moves his fingers in a slow wave so that she can see where the plates slide under each other and connect.

“It’s made of metal?” Ava asks, and wonders what type of metal it is when he nods.“How high up does it go?”

“Shoulder."

She thinks about that.

Obviously, he has the hand because something happened to the first one— _it got hurt_ , he said—but she wonders if he's had the new hand for very long.

She watches the metal plates shift once more and asks, “Does it hurt?”

The man's hand doesn't stop, but it slows, for just a second, like maybe he's thinking about stopping.

“Sometimes," he says, a little bit too late to be really believable.

Ava wants to roll her eyes, but she doesn't want to hurt his feelings.

“My head hurts sometimes, too," she tells him, because she's talked to enough adults to know when they're trying to make something sound a lot nicer than it is.

The soldier makes another puff of air at that, and Ava doesn't know if he's laughing at her or just agreeing.

So she goes back to studying his hand again, and he lets her pick it up, turn it over to study the back.

“That’s really cool," she says, in case he doesn't already know.

“Thanks," the man says.

Ava pokes at the back of his hand, pushes harder than she would on a skin hand.

“Can you feel that?”

The soldier makes a little humming noise that sounds like an agreement, but when she looks up, he's studying her as closely as she was studying his hand, and his eyes look the way Bill used to look, when he tried to talk to her about the explosion.

“Ava," he says. "Where is your dad?”

_Ava, no, wait—_

_What are you doing? Go—_

“He’s dead," Ava says, blunt and honest as she knows how to be, because she knows it makes people feel uncomfortable. "So is Mum. They died, and I was still here, so Bill took me.”

It's what she always says, whenever anyone asks, which is less and less, these days.

She's getting kind of tired of saying it, though, so she thinks that's okay.

And most people don't ask questions after that, and that's okay by her, too.

But the man just tips his head to one side, and Ava thinks about the stray dog that hung around her dad's factory that her dad always complained about and then brought extra food and water for—

“Bill?” he asks, and Ava shrugs.

“Yeah. He was my dad’s friend.”

The man nods, like that makes sense. “Where is Bill?”

“He had to go away," she says, and the metal hand doesn't have fingernails, which is kind of weird. "But he’s going to come back and get me.”

“Oh.”

He says _oh_ in a very grown up way, like he knows something she doesn't, and Ava glances up at him and scowls.

“He is.”

He's going to come back.

He said he would.

(The first time she meets the Soldier, Ava is still very young.)

(She still believes someone will come and save her.)

(That will go away.)

“Okay," the soldier says, and doesn't try to tell her otherwise. "Okay."

Ava remembers that she's been poking at his hand for a while now, and that that's not very good manners, so she lets him put the glove back on, watches as he snaps the buttons at the wrist to cinch it on.

Once he's finished, he looks back down at Ava, and she waits a few more seconds before pointing at the knife that's still tucked neatly away in his sleeve.

“Can you show me the spinning thing again?”

This time, she tries to watch his hand, to see how it's done, to see if it's a trick she can teach herself, during the hours when they put her in a room by herself, and she's bored.

“That’s really cool," she tells him again, once he's stopped.

“Thanks.”

“How long did you have to practice, to get it like that?”

The knife goes back in its sheath.

“A while.”

“That makes sense.”

Ava supposes she can still give it a try.

She doesn't do a whole lot during the day, it'll be nice to have something new for her to try and figure out—

The man turns in the chair, and Ava squeaks, because she can see, all at once, the neat, round holes that are dotted across his shoulders and his back.

_Holes are closing up too quickly._

_He needs a stabilizer._

The blood that oozes from the bullet holes is hard to see against the black jacket, but there's a shine to the cloth, and the plastic covering on the chair is smeared red with blood.

When she squeaks, the soldier turns immediately back to her, and then he presses his shoulders back against the chair, hiding the mess and the holes in his jacket.

“You’d better sit down now," he says, quiet as ever, and Ava frowns.

“Why?”

“The doc’s coming back.”

“Oh," she says, and then frowns again. "How do you know?”

“Can hear him," the man says.

Ava squints at him, suspicious.

No one can hear things that good— _that well_ , her father's voice corrects in the back of her mind, and she almost laughs.

“Don’t be silly," she tells him.

The soldier puffs out another breath, but this time, the corners of his eyes wrinkle just a very little bit, and Ava beams back at him, because it's always nice, when adults talk to her like she's not an idiot.

“Go sit down," he says again, and because he almost, almost smiled, she decides to let him think he's won.

“Okay," she says, and goes to climb back onto the table.

She's just settled into her spot once more when the door flies open, and Dr. Douglas and the men in the black clothes are back again.

"—research only," Dr. Douglas is grumbling, but he stops and forces his face into a smile when he remembers that she's there. "Ava, dear, are you still doing alright?"

A couple of the men in soldier clothes are looking at her like she's an animal in the zoo, and she doesn't like it at all, so she just ducks her head and nods.

She doesn't dare look directly at the soldier, not with so many other people in the room.

But the men in black haul him out of the chair, talking at him in a language she doesn't know, and he doesn't look back at her, either, so she thinks she's okay.

She gets one last look at the awful mess on his back, and then the door closes again, and Dr. Douglas is going back to his checklist of questions to ask her.

_Do you have any concerns regarding the placement or efficacy of the remotely activated dampening system?_

"No concerns," Ava says, and wonders what would happen if she fell all the way down through the building, out onto the streets, however far below.

_On a scale of one to ten, how comfortable would you feel phasing through a solid object on request?_

She thinks about it.

"Ava?" Dr. Douglas prompts.

His mid-appointment surgery seems to have left him all jumpy.

Ava thinks about lying flat on her back and looking up at the underside of her bed and thinking _I will not fall, I will not fall, I will not fall, I will not—_

_How long did you have to practice, to get like that?_

_A while._

"Ava," Dr. Douglas says, and he sounds impatient.

"It would help," she says, slowly and carefully. "If I could practice concentrating."

"Concentrating," the doctor echoes, and scribbles something in his notes.

"Concentrating," Ava agrees, and even at ten years old (almost), she knows they'll never give it to her. "Who would I ask, if I wanted to have a knife?"


End file.
